CNN Technology:

Colliding with nature’s best-kept secrets.

Charlie Rose:

I every much enjoyed the interview with Paola Antonelli last evening.  I’ll add another link to her, this time at TED ... by design.

Later: MoMA, Design and the Elastic Mind. Plenty of information in this interface.

Scientific American:

Buried Prejudice: The Bigot in Your Brain. And yet, I have another story of Mr Jackson.  Once again, from the ‘80’s.  I was coming home late one night from Manhattan, walking through the Princeton University campus from the PJ&B ("Princeton Junction and Back”, the Dinky, the shortest train line in America).  I heard a hubbub coming from Whig (or Clio, I never remember which building is which ... the one that was burned, and re-built), and paused under a streetlamp along the wide flagstone walkway.  I knew Mr Jackson was going to be speaking there that night, so I wondered whether it might be worth walking to the front of the building.  I looked up at the back windows.  Mr Jackson walked by a window, and we happened to perceive each other.  He saw me slightly backlit, and froze with a look of surprise (I thought fear at the time) on his face.  I was dressed in black jeans, black leather jacket, carrying a black briefcase.  I looked like a professional assassin out of some movie, in retrospect.  His ‘handlers’ peeked out at me, and I thought it was time to beat a hasty retreat, taking a different pathway home.

Sometimes ‘bigotry’ may be plain self-preservation.  We unconsciously judge by the predominant cultural archetypes.

Or, simply overactive imagination ... as my 20-something perceptions probably were.

Science Mag:

“Anyone who dreams of a “classless society” may be disheartened by the results of a brain-scanning study reported today: Hierarchical awareness seems to be deeply embedded in the human brain, so much so that there are distinct circuits activated by concerns over social rank ...”

Financial Times:

One language fits all. The ‘imperialism’ of English.

Guardian.UK:

”Imagination in 21st-century literature has been limited by our lack of engagement with history - we need to break out new forms.”

Chronicle of Higher Ed:

America’s Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor’s Degree. “A 2006 study supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 50 percent of college seniors scored below ‘proficient’ levels on a test that required them to do such basic tasks as understand the arguments of newspaper editorials or compare credit-card offers. Almost 20 percent of seniors had only basic quantitative skills. The students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the gas station.” The value of college degree is entrenched in the national psyche, in spite of the lack of substance we’ve all been seeing over the past couple of decades. It’s about time we questioned the quality of graduates - and through them, the quality of education.  The entire 1912 class of Princeton University became millionaires. Any recent such precedents?  Didn’t think so. Two other random observations from the scattered lumber-room of my mind: A) Though Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have no degrees, you don’t generally get jobs at their companies without one. It’s okay for them, just not for you.  B) When the military started requiring degrees for pilots, they lost the best stick-and-rudder aviators - men who lived and breathed airplanes. You don’t train reflexes through books.

Apprenticeships should be revived, IMHO, in many fields.

NY Times Research:

Memory Training Shown to Turn Up Brainpower. So, play Concentration.

Inside Higher Ed:

Making Wikis Work for Scholars. “A good number of college professors “work on Wikipedia pretty regularly, and of course their work is one of the main reasons why Wikipedia is as good as it is ...”

Montaigne:

“The mind that hath no fixed bound, will easily lose itself: For, as we say, ‘To be everywhere, is to be nowhere.’”

Guardian.UK:

Putting faces to fiction. “It seems to me that the more facts one can solicit in the search for truth, the better become one’s chances of finding something that resembles it.”

NY Times Editorial:

That Book Costs How Much? Mark my words, this is how the e-book will enter the mainstream.

SF New Mexican:

College of Santa Fe: Merger could keep school afloat. CSF is one of the best art schools in the area ... it would be a shame for it to close down.

Guardian.UK:

Information alert. I warned about this shortly after I started weblogging.  Unless one is particular in digging for authoritative sources (and able to identify authoritativeness), education will be reduced in quality and value.  The internet itself has no rating of authoritativeness other than popularity, which in itself is worthless.

NY Times Washington:

Government Seeks to Buy Student Loans. Gotta convince the banks to loosen their purse strings again.

Washington Post:

“Nearly 50 student lenders, including some of the industry’s biggest names, have stopped issuing federally guaranteed loans in recent weeks because of paralysis in the credit markets, confronting students with higher borrowing costs just as they are starting to apply for financial assistance for the coming school year.” The halls of academia may be empty this coming fall.

Sydney Morning Herald:

Business-like arts a failure, says entrepreneur. Great observation here: “Throughout the English-speaking world, the board system of governance in the not-for-profit sector has been a miserable failure.”

Inside Higher Ed:

Professors Should Embrace Wikipedia. Utopian thought, professors helping update the pages.  It would be nice to have whole subjects ‘sponsored’ by particular academic groups.  In our busy world, however, time is the issue for such uncompensated work.

The Australian:

Professor explores angles for funding. “… over the past 14 years innovation has been linked to science, technology and engineering.  It has been seen only as an economic benefit, but there is the idea now that benefit is a quadruple bottom line, not just economic. It must also capture social equity, social justice and sustainability.”

The New Yorker

tries to condense the complexities of the Dalai Lama into a page of journalistic prose. If you’ve ever tried to plow through the bland tome, “The Art of Happiness”, you’ll realize the Dalai Lama’s actual beliefs have barely been scratched by any Western authors. Honestly, I’d rather English-language transcripts of his discussions with Tibetan acolytes.  Without the obsequious commentary you generally find in this section of the bookstore.  America needs to recognize that he’s not ‘new-age’ ... but wisdom from much older Asian culture we don’t necessarily recognize or honor.  Asian roots of Western civilization are little discussed in America.

Telegraph.co.UK:

”This takes an amazing amount of ultra-fast processing. Brains that do this are different from brains that don’t.”

There’s a time to talk, and there’s a time to do.  Wise are they that know the difference.

Macleans.CA:

Librarians would like to offer digital pop music — but the big labels aren’t co-operating. With free services like Deezer and Pandora, I’m not sure libraries need to go here.  Archival sound, yes.  Current pop music?  Probably not.  This is within most library’s budgets, certainly.  Hire an intern, reduce to MP3, post. 

Hoover:

“While it is theoretically possible for individuals and small communities to opt out of globalization and its benefits, in practice this is not an option that all people in all countries will choose, at least not based on their own free will.”

NY Times Education:

“… many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.” My italics.

DiplomaGuide:

Online Creative Writing Courses Offered Free by Top Universities and Educational Websites.